Carrie Brownstein performs joke song ‘Somber Grrrl’ for Colbert

Sleater-Kinney guitarist and Portlandia star Carrie Brownstein released her memoir, Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl, this week, and Tuesday night she visited Late Show with Stephen Colbert to talk about if she’s “cool” and the difference between performing in a band and doing comedy. There are many sides to Carrie Brownstein, but the most famous two are: the one who shreds onstage with Corin Tucker and Janet Weiss as part of the punk rock band Sleater-Kinney and the one who gets goofy with comedian Fred Armisen on the sketch show “Portlandia.” Now there’s another variation: Brownstein the writer.

But she also hung out backstage for a bit in which she debuted a special new, uh, song called “Somber Grrrl.” (What a way to honor the riot grrrl movement!) “Playing in Sleater-Kinney has been a great opportunity for me,” Bronstein says. “But sometimes I feel like it prevented me from performing the kind of music I personally enjoy. Her memoir delivers on all counts, offering a sharp-eyed tale of a singular time in music and culture… Her voice on the page is as distinctive as her music, packing a similar punch—introspective, complex, both funny and sad, ending with the band’s breakup in 2006 and a particularly painful personal sequence.

Here are some of the memorable takeaways including Brownstein’s side job, her famous friends and that time she witnessed an orgy and felt totally uncomfortable. A strong, engaging pop culture memoir: personal detail, a little dish, and a well-written look at what made the music, and the culture that spawned it, matter.” –Library Journal starred review “Brownstein flips easily from brainy ruminations on nostalgia, fandom, and record labels to trenchant stories about sexism, music journalism, and how a soy allergy—not drugs or alcohol—brought her to her knees on tour… her vivid Sleater-Kinney stories and descriptions of their albums are downright irresistible.

She likes to make jabs at the “business casual” get-ups she wore when performing with Sleater-Kinney and regales readers with tales of her enduring awkwardness. During shows, the band would ask audience members if they had some floor space where the Sleater-Kinney members could crash on a mattress they nicknamed “P.M.,” which stood for pube magnet. The first time she met people from Matador Records, for example, she acted like a “raincloud freakshow.” Translation: Her attitude was a lot like an angsty standoffishness teenager.

There was one Valentine’s Day party that sounds like a drunken mess that all started with a game of spin the bottle and devolved from there into a make-out fest. The morning after, Brownstein went to visit her friend Miranda July (the artist and filmmaker best known recently for her bizarre and delightful New York Times interview with Rihanna) and couldn’t help but notice that her friend’s neck was covered in hickeys. Brownstein gives D.C. a little shout-out when she writes about getting a visit from her friends Ian Svenonius and James Canty from Washington band the Make-Up while she was touring in Paris. They were hanging out with a bunch of guys and two women, who might have been prostitutes, when things got “Dionysian.” It was a little uncomfortable. “I wanted to come across as insouciant. But that doesn’t change the fact that when she tried to get into a party after performing in Oberlin, Ohio, she was turned away, because the place was too full, “as if there were a legal capacity to which they were adhering and only so many rubbery vegan hot dogs and red Solo cups to go around.” She wasn’t alone, though.

Sleater-Kinney’s opener — a little band called the White Stripes — also got rejected. “I often think back on those two guys who turned us away, wondering if they know they kicked Jack White out of their party — if they saw him later on TV or in a magazine and thought he looked familiar, if he reminded them of the tall guy who stood helplessly on their front lawn and then walked back to an outdated, beat-up van.” So if you happened to be a high schooler in the Olympia School District circa 2000, the rocker may have given you a pop quiz or pressed play on a laserdisc.